Lot 90 : Charles Sheeler
Auction Location: United States of America - 2001
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Description:
Charles Sheeler
(1883-1965)
'BLEEDER STACKS, FORD PLANT, DETROIT'
mounted, signed by the photographer in pencil on the mount, credited to the photographer, titled, and dated, possibly by the photographer, in pencil on the reverse, matted, a Museum of Modern Art label on the reverse, 1927, printed no later than 1941
9 1/2 by 7 1/2 in. 24.1 by 19.1 cm.
Provenance
Gift of the photographer, 1941
Literature
Stebbins and Keyes, Sheeler: The Photographs, pl. 49
Montclair Art Museum, Precisionism in America, cat. no. 54
Detroit Institute of Art, The Rouge, cat. no. 10
In 1927, Sheeler was asked by Vaughn Flannery, the art director of N. W. Ayer & Son Advertising, to produce a series of documentary photographs for the firm's client, the Ford Motor Company. Flannery suggested that Sheeler concentrate on Ford's River Rouge plant, which had been conceived of by Henry Ford as a facility capable of the total autonomous production of automobiles. The largest industrial complex in the world at that time, on eleven hundred acres, the Rouge covered all aspects of automobile production, from smelting steel to assembly. The Rouge's nearly one hundred structures were connected by almost one hundred miles of railroad.
The result was a series of photographs that are perhaps Sheeler's most important. Sheeler visited the Rouge in November of 1927 and spent considerable time touring the immense complex before photographing. The massive utilitarian structures of the plant provided ample subject matter for the photographer, who later remarked of the River Rouge plant that, "There, I was to find forms which looked right because they had been designed with their eventual utility in view and in the successful fulfillment of their purpose it was inevitable that beauty should be attained" (The Rouge, p. Sheeler:12).
Sheeler's Rouge photographs were widely reproduced in the United States and Europe, earning Sheeler almost immediate international recognition. A number of the images appeared in the seminal 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, and a select group was shown in the retrospective of Sheeler's art at The Museum of Modern Art in 1939. By the early 1930s, Sheeler turned almost exclusively to painting, but he continued to draw inspiration from his River Rouge photographs, and many of these provided the basis for his later canvases.
The photograph offered here shows the bleeder stacks located to the west of Blast Furnace B. The valves on top of the stacks released excess gas from the precipitator and disintegrator attendant to the furnace, to prevent sudden pressure surges. These structures no longer exist.
At the time of this writing, only four other prints of this image have been located, all in institutions: another print in The Museum of Modern Art; and prints in the Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Amon Carter Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The print retained by The Museum of Modern Art was given to the Museum by Samuel Kootz, a young art historian and critic who later became a leading dealer in Abstract Expressionism. Kootz also gave to the Museum, among other things, a print of Paul Strand's Seaweed, Maine, Lot 87 in the present sale.
The print offered here was a gift to The Museum of Modern Art from Charles Sheeler. Sheeler donated this print to the Museum in 1941, at the time he replaced prints of other Sheeler images in the Museum's collection (see Lot 91).
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